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However, what do you mean when you say "Unix"? Do you mean an OS specifically named "Unix" (only one platform that I know of actually is called "Unix", notably SCO's UnixWare) or any platform which has been certified by The Open Group (which owns the trademark to the name "Unix")? Given the fragmented nature of the Unix market, you need to be very specific.

Besides, a lot of sites do run Linux, plus a few run the BSDs, e.g. FreeBSD and OpenBSD.

i was refering to implementation such as AIX

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Originally Posted by IRJustman

Remember the i-Opener? Its native OS was QNX. The main people who bought the i-Opener were hackers who wanted a nice, cheap Linux platform, which was not the device's target audience. Though it also should be noted that the i-Opener was not a general-purpose computer. Its only intended uses were to browse the web and read e-mail.

Yeah, that is right. Qnx is used nowadays in many applications, i think some sat nav uses it and stb as well. But i personally think QNX can do better.

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Originally Posted by IRJustman

Plus it could be argued that FreeBSD is already on people's desks in some form, notably in the form of Macos. Granted it uses its own form of BSD (Darwin), the fact that Jordan Hubbard, the initial leader of the FreeBSD project, has moved on to Apple, bringing a lot of his FreeBSD experience with him, brings some of FreeBSD onto users' desktops.

Didn't think of that ^^. Actually some gateways, routers and firewall are using a from of bsd.

I definitely agree with you, that OS choice really depends on what you want to do and what is required. I mean most people don't what a sat nav with a command-line interface do they?

Speakin' of which, I should haul my RS/6000 out of storage one of these fine days. I couldn't believe that thing of its vintage (about '91 or '92 or so) had enough computing power to play MP3s (though given the fact this computer has no sound, I had to use NAS over my network and at 10 megabits a second to a computer which does, that's pushing my luck).

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Yeah, that is right. Qnx is used nowadays in many applications, i think some sat nav uses it and stb as well. But i personally think QNX can do better.

Though QNX is primarily a real-time OS used in embedded systems. However, the versions I picked up could have potential for being a full-out desktop system (including an X server so Unix apps could be reasonably ported to it), but there's just no application support for it.

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Didn't think of that ^^. Actually some gateways, routers and firewall are using a from of bsd.

Actually, the main BSD firewall/router system is m0n0wall. Usually, that's either a normal computer or an embedded system. Most consumer routers use either Linux (or can be replaced with such free distributions like DD-WRT (my current favorite), OpenWRT or others) or Wind River Systems' VxWorks (most of the newer LinkSys routers use it).

I usually have apt-get or yum install both smplayer and kaffeine from the repositories; then they'll get all the necessary dependencies automatically. They install mplayer and xine as their respective engines.

As WK said, you'll need to have additional repositories enabled to obtain the licensed or otherwise dicey parts like codecs or libdvdcss. My copy of Ubuntu 8.10 had the non-free repository already enabled (rather surprisingly if you ask me*). For Fedora you'll want to visit the new RPM Fusion site or ATrpms.

Programs like smplayer that rely on the mplayer engine work across platforms, though if you browse the Playback Forum you'll see people have been working on custom mplayer builds for Windows and OS X.

Most any modern Linux distribution includes a number of torrent clients; I use deluge because it's pretty lightweight, though nothing beats ctorrent in that department.

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* This might survive legal challenges in the US because the repository list doesn't actually contain the proprietary software. It's akin to the DeCSS cases a few years back, which were mostly heard in California, not Federal, courts. Posting the source code to DeCSS was held to be a violation of trade secret laws, but the trial court refused to ban linking to sites where the code was available. I don't believe this particular aspect of the decision has ever been reviewed, though. Because the defendant had posted the actual code on a US web server, the CA Supremes never reached the linking argument.

The other legal alternative would be for Ubuntu to buy the rights to the proprietary codecs and just eat the cost of the licenses. A full pack of codecs in the GStreamer format costs about $50 from Fluendo. You still can't watch DVDs with this package; it doesn't contain a CSS decoder. I realize that since Mark Shuttlesworth could afford $65 million to go into space, he could probably afford to buy the rights to all the software in nonfree as well. I think the problem is more getting the rightsholders, particularly those governing the DVD and BD schemes, to negotiate. (He can probably also afford the attorneys to defend the decision to distribute the nonfree respository lists.)

Who maintains the nonfree Ubuntu repositories anyway? I'm only acquainted with the Fedora world, where the repositories are maintained by volunteers and hosted outside the US. I've noticed that you can download proprietary items in Ubuntu restricted from servers whose names start with "us." A quick DNS search told me that us.archive.ubuntu.com is actually hosted in Poland on servers in the canonical.com domain.

There is a reason why WinXP is the dominant system in the market. Yes, I have tried Linux and Mac. Mac could be nice, but doesn't suit for gaming. Same goes for Linux, which is also too technical to be convinient.

As WK said, you'll need to have additional repositories enabled to obtain the licensed or otherwise dicey parts like codecs or libdvdcss. My copy of Ubuntu 8.10 had the non-free repository already enabled (rather surprisingly if you ask me*).

Every copy of Ubuntu Server and Kubuntu has had it enabled that I've seen. However, for stuff which has patents or worse, the law, keeping it from being used either legally (patents) or at all (the law) and some seriously non-free stuff (like anything from Adobe) require you to have put in the Medibuntu sources.

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Most any modern Linux distribution includes a number of torrent clients; I use deluge because it's pretty lightweight, though nothing beats ctorrent in that department.

Actually, rtorrent is my favorite console-mode BitTorrent client. It's very similar to Vuze (nee Azureus) and muTorrent in that you can get a LOT of stats on your torrents in addition to a lot of other features you've come to take for granted in a graphical client. I just wish it had a plugin architecture like Vuze does, which would give me a reason to kill X on my fileserver (it's a headless machine, so I use the VNC X server to use any graphical programs).

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Who maintains the nonfree Ubuntu repositories anyway? I'm only acquainted with the Fedora world, where the repositories are maintained by volunteers and hosted outside the US. I've noticed that you can download proprietary items in Ubuntu restricted from servers whose names start with "us." A quick DNS search told me that us.archive.ubuntu.com is actually hosted in Poland on servers in the canonical.com domain.[/size]

I don't know whether you're talking about the "non-free" meaning non-free stuff or Medibuntu. They are different in content and purpose.

The "non-free" repository stated in /etc/apt/sources.list only contains items whose licensing is at odds with the DFSG along with the "contrib" repository which includes FOSS software which rely on items in non-free. The Medibuntu repository deals with software which includes several normal closed-source freebs like Acrobat Reader and the Flash Plugin along with Free/Open Source Software which embodies concepts which are ether protected by patent (e.g. MPEG decoding software) or forbidden by law (DeCSS)

As for Fedora, the last time I ever used it, it just about made me want to slit my wrists. I absolutely hated it. The netinstall was needlessly difficult in that it required me to know beforehand a URL for a YUM repository. It didn't even have a preset list of mirrors like Ubuntu has. Since I was building a server to do some hacking, I told it to not install GNOME or X--which it happily did anyway, but left unconfigured. That's on top of my outright distaste for RPM to begin with. Needless to say, I'm never using Fedora again or anything derived from Red Hat's distributions.

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Originally Posted by Wordplay

Same goes for Linux, which is also too technical to be convinient.

Have you even tried Linux in any flavor at all? It sounds like you're a candidate for Ubuntu or its other desktop derivatives.

Have you even tried Linux in any flavor at all? It sounds like you're a candidate for Ubuntu or its other desktop derivatives.

Of all things, Ubuntu is the idiot child of the Linux world. It tries to copy windows/osx design but instead of producing a user interface system it just adds a GUI presentation layer on top of all of Linux's most cursed problems in the hope they will solve themselves (or at least that was it last time I checked it out).

Why would it get technical? well windows users generally disagree with linux users fetish to OSS (it doesn't just have to be OSS to be good). The linux community seems to hate auto-installation packages very very much so it's only natural anyone migrating to almost any linux distro from windows will find himself hacking at the system to get the basic things, like for example decent font rendering, maybe some video drivers and sound support so things actually have a chance of looking good; not to mention all the other headaches you may face just to get it to that "oh but linux has this and that now" state everyone likes to praise it nowadays. Last time I checked you still have to do everything though the console...

See how it gets complicated and technical? of course if you're satisfied with the staircase font and choppy rendering (not that the user interface is usually anything great to look at) and only use that oh-ever-so-praised magic console that in the last 40 years (did I get it right?) hasn't managed to move past the pathetic tab completion and overly simplistic history and shortcut system, you wouldn't really care about these sorts of problems.

I don't know whether you're talking about the "non-free" meaning non-free stuff or Medibuntu. They are different in content and purpose.

I'm talking about things like libavcodec and libdvdcss which cannot be distributed within the US without violating the law. I don't know anything about Medibuntu; never used it.

Ian, I think we've all come to know your antipathy for Fedora and RedHat at this point. I don't think you need to remind us how much you hate them every time they are mentioned. Some people like Fedora; I used it for years. I just mentioned Livna and company for completeness. If I knew how to obtain the same items for SuSE I'd mention it as well.

I prefer linux most, but i am stuck with windows for the time being because my laptop broke and i havent got round to installing it on my pc yet xD

Overall its the best OS, my favourite being fedora. Also its so easy to use for a number of tasks. If you love watching anime Mplayer or SMplayer (its just basically a simplistic Mplayer GUI) would be the best choice (VLC is probably easier, but i found subtitles a problem). And you can get it from the included package manager (Yum/PackageKit)

No need to worry about viruses, and pretty simple to use. The GUI is brilliant (especially if you install compiz-fusion and play about with it a bit)

Free alternatives to just about any application on windows or mac, and you have WINE for the ones that dont have alternatives ^^.

Have you even tried Linux in any flavor at all? It sounds like you're a candidate for Ubuntu or its other desktop derivatives--

--You don't need to be a UNIX wiz hacker in order to use it for day-to-day tasks (which is what the vast majority of the computer userbase worldwide do with their PCs).

If you had read my past reply, you would had noticed that I said I have tried Linux, including Ubuntu. It was a year or two ago, but I remember how the "most user-friendly distro of 'em all" failed to install because of some unknown network error. Imagine that from your standard out-of-the-pack default install. Then imagine if it was a commercial product. Consumers would sue the company to the bowels of earth and never see it again.

We have it at the uni too, though. Looked nice, but for a tech support guy it's hell, since Linux (any distro) absolutely requires you to know terminal inside-out the moment you want to get something working or find your first error.

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Yes, and that is because people don't even know what an OS is. They just use "the PC", and Windows is a part of it.

Of course. Windows XP is the de facto standard of the market. Why? Well, what has Linux been doing since 1995? Come to think of it, what has Linux done since 2000 when the same old gripes as today became apparent?

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Have you tried Linux in say, the past 4 years? Over 50% of the people in our local Ubuntu community don't know jack about computers and still they manage along just fine with it.

Yes, like I said in my first post. I have tried SuSe 9 and 10, Fedora Core 7-9, different versions of Ubuntu and Mandriva, liveCD and install. So who are these 50% of your local community people? What is this community? Are we talking about you and your friends or a larger community as a whole?

Imagine that from your standard out-of-the-pack default install. The imagine if it was a commercial product.

People don't install Windows XP--it comes installed for them. That is, all hardware and all drivers come already preinstalled with the PC they buy. Linux includes a crapload of drivers, many more than Windows XP. With supported hardware (nowadays almost everything is well-supported out of the box, except webcams and some other exotic hardware. Many wireless cards aren't as simple but they've passed from being a pain in the ass in 2007 from requiring a couple of clicks in 2008), installation is mostly painless. If you do an installation on unsupported hardware, expect to have to do some work.

By the way, I remember I had a lot of pain getting audio on a fresh Windows XP installation after I lost my motherboard's CD. I didn't have internet access at the time so it was kinda not an easy to fix problem. Linux, OTOH, has never required me to install additional drivers (I'm lucky to have supported hardware--but you see how it goes).

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We have it at the uni too, though. Looked nice, but for a tech support guy it's hell, since Linux (any distro) absolutely requires you to know terminal inside-out the moment you want to get something working or find your first error.

No, for a tech-support guy (part of my work requires me to be a UNIX sysadmin, so I kinda know what I'm talking about here) the terminal is a blessing. Many errors on Windows XP are so bizarre they're extremely difficult to track down.

Of course, if you're a crappy tech support guy who doesn't know anything about UNIX, how can you expect to be able to fix Linux problems and understand the aid that the console represents when trying to solve problems? (especially problems that are not yours, but your customers'/friends'/etc).

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Of course. Windows XP is the de facto standard of the market. Why? Well, what has Linux been doing since 1995? Come to think of it, what has Linux done since 2000 when the same old gripes as today became apparent?

Repeat with me: Linux is not a company. Linux doesn't have the same structure as a company. Linux doesn't have a centralized marketing team. Linux doesn't have a huge wad of cash behind it. Well, at least not as much money as Windows has behind it.

And I repeat, how can you expect people who don't even know what an OS is to try and install one?

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Place them in a box until a quieter time | Lights down, you up and die.

Imagine that from your standard out-of-the-pack default install. The imagine if it was a commercial product. Consumers would sue the company to the bowels of earth and never see it again.

I would just like to add that installing Windows is an often bigger pain than installing Linux. I just spent about 6 hours yesterday trying to get Vista to install, only to figure out that the retarded thing needs at least 10GB of space (I mean wtf? How much crap did they manage to stick on?), AHCI disabled in the BIOS, not having an extended partition, having all other drives plugged out (and I don't remember what other stupid conditions)... Isn't this a bit too far? Anywhere where I tried to dump Linux so far I never had a single problem. And here is Windows assuming that the user installing it is a total retard.

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"Light and shadow don't battle each other, because they're two sides of the same coin"

I would just like to add that installing Windows is an often bigger pain than installing Linux. I just spent about 6 hours yesterday trying to get Vista to install, only to figure out that the retarded thing needs at least 10GB of space (I mean wtf? How much crap did they manage to stick on?), AHCI disabled in the BIOS, not having an extended partition, having all other drives plugged out (and I don't remember what other stupid conditions)... Isn't this a bit too far? Anywhere where I tried to dump Linux so far I never had a single problem. And here is Windows assuming that the user installing it is a total retard.

It requires 10GB just so the copy fits. Vista gets really fun afterwards. If you have updates enabled, after a few months expect the size of your windows folder (yes folder not partition) to reach 15-20GB.

Browsing around inside the windows folder it appears that Vista doesn't clean up after itself .... that's due to the System Restore snapshot function but I'm wondering how long that remains tenable in a huge flat file collection.

Oh and yes, Vista flames and dies just as thoroughly as Linux unless every component in the system was "Vista-approved" ... and then it fugs anyway sometimes. Suing Microsoft for failing to install? Wait a minute while I clean the coffee spill up from laughing so hard. And I work with Microsoft Partners who pay oodles for "MS support".

I still have wireless card issues with Linux (usually Ubuntu these days) but that's mostly because too many of the wireless chip families are shitheads about providing the specs for drivers. Otherwise almost anything I cobble together accepts it fairly well. Biggest hang up for Joe User is still those attachable devices (cameras, printers, etc) that assume a Windows system. So the house is a mix of several OSes for convenience... spend money where I have to, don't spend it where I don't have to.

People don't install Windows XP--it comes installed for them-- And I repeat, how can you expect people who don't even know what an OS is to try and install one?

I suppose you are right here. Yet re-installing WinXP is as easy as clicking next, next, next...

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Linux includes a crapload of drivers, many more than Windows XP. With supported hardware (nowadays almost everything is well-supported out of the box

For me, none of the Linux distroes have worked with my run-of-the-mill Sound Blaster Audigy 2. Just for reference, to get any kind of real benefit from your 3D-card you have to get the drivers from Nvidia or Ati. How do you install it? Oh, right... You go to the terminal and COMPILE the damn thing. Who here knows how to compile and/or install stuff via yum?

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No, for a tech-support guy (part of my work requires me to be a UNIX sysadmin, so I kinda know what I'm talking about here) the terminal is a blessing-- Of course, if you're a crappy tech support guy who doesn't know anything about UNIX, how can you expect to be able to fix Linux problems and understand the aid that the console represents when trying to solve problems?

Would you believe it that Unix/Linux know-how isn't exactly at the top when they interview people for IT jobs?

I suppose you are right here. Yet re-installing WinXP is as easy as clicking next, next, next...

Ubuntu, Fedora and Suse do the exact same thing, and with a full-fledged graphical interface to boot.

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Just for reference, to get any kind of real benefit from your 3D-card you have to get the drivers from Nvidia or Ati. How do you install it? Oh, right... You go to the terminal and COMPILE the damn thing. Who here knows how to compile and/or install stuff via yum?